Comment 45 for bug 215499

I think it is REALLY URGENT that a general fix get out there for all Ubuntu users. I (and everyone else) am wildly promoting 8.04 as the Vista alternative... and it strikes me as plain silly to not fix this problem pronto. It is so off-putting to use an OS that cannot keep file dates correct.... that I'd suggest fixing it in Nautilus if needs be, and if/when lower level modules are fixed to no longer cause the problem, THEN remove the workaround in Nautilus.
The suggestion that it has anything to do with 'design decisions' is a FURPHY... There is NO JUSTIFICATION for 'touching' (ie redating) a set of files simply because they are copied unaltered to another location (esp on same computer). The bug is presumably that, as permissions are added to files not in *nix file system, someone decided to 're-date' file, as if someone had edited something.... but it will always be just a bug. The Russian commentator was right - when you have two copies of a file (unaltered) you have two instances of the one file and NOT two files of different dates!
The fact that you can't 'reliably' copy photos from your camera, or files off a removable drive etc is a SEVERE error for any user. Yes, you can use Archive Manager to do a tar.gz zip file of them and then Extract them on the target drive... but it slows down a file copy 50x. The error is so severe as to prevent average users from using the OS... so it is critical that it be fixed FOR ALL USERS quickly.
Graeme (30 years IT experience, former Harvard Consultant to The White House on IT policy, on team of five which developed first electronic spreadsheet - Visicalc - at Harvard Business School in 1978, etc)